Control a playlist with your mind

Because switching apps to change a song is such a taxing ordeal, [Oscar Celma] and [Ching-Wei Chen] decided to use their collective brainpower to change Last.FM playlists with their minds. They call their project Buddhafy, and it works by taking off-the-shelf EEG hardware and tying it into music streaming APIs.

For the build, the guys used a NeuroSky MindWave to read alpha waves inside [Oscar]’s head. The data from the MindWave was passed into a Python script that sends requests to the Last.FM and Spotify APIs. High alpha waves in brain wave patterns correspond with concentration or a deep meditative state. If [Oscar] concentrates very hard, he’ll be rewarded with calm and relaxing tunes. If [Oscar] loses focus, the music changes to the best song ever written.

The guys put up the slides from the presentation they gave at MusicHackDay in San Fransisco this last week. There’s also a video of their build in action; you can check that out after the break.

I think with a bit of datacapture and software feedback you could do some interesting things. Perhaps you could firstly chart archetypal responses to different songs (As in: not everyone likes every song, but most people will fit into a finite set of responses). (You could also sell this to people who want to buy this kinda data.)

Then you could calibrate your own responses, determining what states and songprints allow you to change most efficiently between different brainwave states.

Then you could make a dial, complete with Arduino, which allows you to pick what mood you want to feel.